What do you think?
Wake Up
John is a successful businessman, happily married with a wife and baby. Why is he circling the ring road of his city, unable to face his family, his work, his brother? As he passes the same exit again and again, his life unfolds in front of the reader.
- GenresFiction
227 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Tim Pears
21 books103 followersBorn in 1956, Tim Pears grew up in Devon and left school at sixteen. He worked in a wide variety of unskilled jobs: trainee welder, assistant librarian, trainee reporter, archaeological worker, fruit picker, nursing assistant in a psychiatric ward, groundsman in a hotel & caravan park, fencer, driver, sorter of mail, builder, painter & decorator, night porter, community video maker and art gallery manager in Devon, Wales, France, Norfolk and Oxford.
Always he was writing, and in time making short films. He took the Directing course at the National Film and Television School, graduating in the same month that his first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, was published, in 1993.
Always he was writing, and in time making short films. He took the Directing course at the National Film and Television School, graduating in the same month that his first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, was published, in 1993.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 16, 2017
This book is structurally very interesting and there are some other interesting aspects to it. Apart from the last epilogue chapter, it all takes place on one day between 8am and 4pm, while John, a middle-aged business man drives round and round the ring road surrounding his town. Through his thoughts over this time we learn a good chunk of his life story.
We learn that John is an unreliable narrator and also he becomes less and less likeable. There's a sort plot twist and a sort of reveal near the end, but neither is really surprising or important. Other than that there's not really any plot. That's not the point. There's character reveal but no character development and there's no source of information other than John, who we learn to distrust early on. According to the blurbs it's comedy, but I didn't find it funny.
There was an awful lot of interesting stuff going on, though, interesting characters, anecdotes, settings, observations. It's compellingly written, too. It kept me driving round and round on the same road for hours with a man I didn't even like.
We learn that John is an unreliable narrator and also he becomes less and less likeable. There's a sort plot twist and a sort of reveal near the end, but neither is really surprising or important. Other than that there's not really any plot. That's not the point. There's character reveal but no character development and there's no source of information other than John, who we learn to distrust early on. According to the blurbs it's comedy, but I didn't find it funny.
There was an awful lot of interesting stuff going on, though, interesting characters, anecdotes, settings, observations. It's compellingly written, too. It kept me driving round and round on the same road for hours with a man I didn't even like.
September 2, 2013
Disappointing read years after enjoying In the place of fallen leaves so much. I don't know why he has to be so crass. Apparently the Brits are crazy about him, but I don't think I'll read his other books.
April 16, 2015
I like Tim Pears. But Wake Up failed to move me. Slightly unsettling, yes, but not moving. And lacking the polish of his better novels.
March 27, 2019
I'd like to start off my review by saying that I am a big fan of Tim Pears and try to read all of his novels but sometimes feel he falls completely short of the mark which I expect of him.
I wanted to enjoy this novel, and indeed, in the first 20 or so pages I thought this would be a fun and engaging story about a man told across two time periods - his immediate present which was falling into disaster, and his working-class origins which were at odds to his current lifestyle.
It quickly became apparent that neither of these threads would become a main theme and I would aliken this book to a frayed quilt. It gives you glimpses of a whole with tantalising sections of beautiful original fabric here and there but with patches elsewhere. I'm really not entirely sure what the novel was actually about. The narrator was rambling and all over the place. I'm sure that this was Pears' intention, but it frustrated me and I wished I could have been reading one or two of the threads of the story rather than this mishmash. It is something I have frequently seen with inexperienced authors, where they throw more and more ingredients into the pot in the hope of spicing it up (think incest, childbirth, poverty, prostitution, death) but you end up with something immensely dissatisfying and at odds with itself. I am amazed, however, that given this is Pears' fourth novel he fell into the same traps. I mean, I was on about p180 before I realised the narrator had had two wives. It was rambling and so difficult to care about despite the actual subject matter (vaccines gone wrong and "new money") being so interesting.
A good idea, but a disappointing outcome.
I wanted to enjoy this novel, and indeed, in the first 20 or so pages I thought this would be a fun and engaging story about a man told across two time periods - his immediate present which was falling into disaster, and his working-class origins which were at odds to his current lifestyle.
It quickly became apparent that neither of these threads would become a main theme and I would aliken this book to a frayed quilt. It gives you glimpses of a whole with tantalising sections of beautiful original fabric here and there but with patches elsewhere. I'm really not entirely sure what the novel was actually about. The narrator was rambling and all over the place. I'm sure that this was Pears' intention, but it frustrated me and I wished I could have been reading one or two of the threads of the story rather than this mishmash. It is something I have frequently seen with inexperienced authors, where they throw more and more ingredients into the pot in the hope of spicing it up (think incest, childbirth, poverty, prostitution, death) but you end up with something immensely dissatisfying and at odds with itself. I am amazed, however, that given this is Pears' fourth novel he fell into the same traps. I mean, I was on about p180 before I realised the narrator had had two wives. It was rambling and so difficult to care about despite the actual subject matter (vaccines gone wrong and "new money") being so interesting.
A good idea, but a disappointing outcome.
January 6, 2024
I had high hopes for this book, having enjoyed Tim Pears‘ West Country trilogy so much. But, by contrast, this novel is poor. By the end I was unclear what he was getting at and found the characters, particularly the main protagonist, deeply unsympathetic. The book does not wear its research lightly, making it clunky. The author’s imagining often world of business is particularly unconvincing, almost cartoonish.
June 1, 2017
The plot was a little bit all over the place. The book had very little to do with genetics, which I was led to believe it would provide interesting insight into, based on its write up. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the author's writing style, and in some ways the twisted thinking that came out, only to realise it wasn't factually based.
April 2, 2019
I was really intrigued by the plot of this book but it was definitely not for me. I really did not enjoy the writing style. It felt all over the place. I thought it would get into more about the drug trials and the deaths but much of the book was back story and quite repetitive. I found myself glossing over paragraphs trying to get to the trials.
April 4, 2012
Globalization. Modified technology. Personality Disorders. Human life. Half-truths. Potatoes.
This book was kind of a slow-paced for me. John Sharpe, the main character and narrator of the story drives along the Ring Road while taking us (the readers) into his different experiences and adventures while he was growing up, childhood to adolescence to manhood.
There were a lot of deceiving information throughout the story. John would narrate it as if it really had happened but later reveal that it wasn't true. Tim Pears made me realize easy it is to deceive one's perception through ideal storytelling. Wake up, man!
Simultaneous. There wasn't really a direct timeline being followed but it somehow made this book more interesting than it is.
This book was kind of a slow-paced for me. John Sharpe, the main character and narrator of the story drives along the Ring Road while taking us (the readers) into his different experiences and adventures while he was growing up, childhood to adolescence to manhood.
There were a lot of deceiving information throughout the story. John would narrate it as if it really had happened but later reveal that it wasn't true. Tim Pears made me realize easy it is to deceive one's perception through ideal storytelling. Wake up, man!
Simultaneous. There wasn't really a direct timeline being followed but it somehow made this book more interesting than it is.
December 7, 2010
John Sharpe is driving round the ring round; and getting steadily loopier as time goes on. Very little time passes in the course of the book. A whole heap of reflections by an unreliable narrator. Great stuff! There's an underlying semi-pseudo-plot about genetic modification, but it's not how I thought it would be when I read the teasers.
I definitely need to read Pears' other books.
May 30, 2008
Two brothers run a potato empire. The geeky one is involved in a GM trial that went wrong and is turning himself in psychological knots re his guilt (or otherwise) about that and all sort of other things. The main "shock" is quite predictable, but the other, not at all. A quick read, but a very good one.
March 28, 2014
kind of not getting anywhere
October 2, 2014
Potatoes.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews